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| ISBN-13: | 9781780762357 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2012 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE RETURN OF ULYSSES A CULTURAL HISTORY OF HOMER'S ODYSSEY
By EDITH HALL THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Edith Hall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8869-4
Chapter One EMBARKATION
Muse, sing for me about that versatile man, who sacked the sacred city of Troy and then wandered far and wide (Odyssey 1.1-2).
In the late Bronze Age, a king from the western islands of Greece was delayed sailing home after a war in Asia, but did eventually return to recover his wife, son and throne. His story was told by bards, and in about 750 BCE one of them - the Greeks said he was blind and named Homer - put the finishing touches to the epic poem called the Odyssey, which opens with the invocation above. This story stays fresh nearly three millennia later - but why? The recent editor of an anthology of texts inspired by the plays of Shakespeare admits that Homer, and only Homer, has proved an equally powerful source of inspiration for later authors. Another scholar has argued that it can be difficult even to identify 'spin-offs' from the Odyssey, so deeply has it shaped our imagination and cultural values. My book explores the reasons for the enormity of this poem's cultural presence.
This is a foolhardy quest. The vastness of the terrain should discourage all but optimistic travellers. Another deterrent should be the quality of the previous explorations. In Stanford's TheUlysses Theme, the first edition of which was published more than half a century ago (1954), the reasons for Odysseus' survival in the literature of later centuries was subjected to a brilliant analysis. The material that Stanford had collected still arouses awe in any wannabe successor, even one equipped with online library catalogues. Stanford's book has already inspired fine epigones, notably the accessible An Odyssey round Odysseus by Beaty Rubens and Oliver Taplin (1989), and Piero Boitani's heavyweight study The Shadow of Ulysses (1994). Several useful collections of essays have also been published. Yet it seems to me that a new investigation is timely. Even in his second edition of 1968, and the more popular The Quest for Ulysses that he published with J.V. Luce in 1974, Stanford was writing in a world that had not adjusted to feminism, let alone post-colonialism, and in which few movies had engaged with the Odyssey.
This book takes a different trajectory from most of its predecessors. It is a study of the influence of the Odyssey rather than the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses. It does not discuss textual matters such as the 'authenticity' of the final book of the Odyssey, where the hero is finally reunited with his father. Indeed, Laertes supports my argument that one reason for the poem's enduring popularity must be that its personnel is so varied that every ancient or modern listener, of any age, sex or status, seaman or servant, will have found someone with whom to identify. There has been a tendency to see the Iliad as a young man's poem, and the Odyssey as a poem of old age; the ancient critic Longinus saw its ethical focus as a sign of its author's advancing years: 'great minds in their declination stagger into Fabling', as John Hall of Consett translated it in 1652. But youths relate to Telemachus, and the strength of the entire cast means that it has been possible to rewrite the Odyssey from the perspective of old men, of teenage girls, of Elpenor, of Circe's swine, and even of Polyphemus.
Several recent writers have identified themselves with Homer, above all Jorge Luis Borges, who as his own sight began to fail, in his semi-autobiographical El Hacedor (1960), spoke of divining the 'murmur of glory and hexameters ... of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle'. But my book does not contribute to the controversy about the identity of 'Homer', who was alleged in antiquity variously to have been a lover taken by Penelope, a blind resident of Chios, a descendant of the mystic Orpheus, or a native of Smyrna (Izmir) named Melisigenes. My favourite conjecture is not that the author of the Odyssey was a woman (see Chapter 9), but that both Homeric epics were created by Odysseus himself. That nobody else was an eyewitness of both the Trojan War and the voyage of Odysseus was pointed out in all seriousness decades before Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851) made Ishmael, the sole survivor of another ill-fated voyage, narrate his tale.
The Odyssey is attractive simply on account of its great age. The great storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien commented, in connection with H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), on the perennial human desire to 'survey' tracts of time. Tolkien's inhabitants of Middle-earth, in the late Third Age, recall the olden days that preceded them. Yet my book is not arranged chronologically, nor does it follow the temporal order of events as presented in the poem. Instead its route travels via responses to the poem grouped according to genres, media, and sociological or psychological topics. But even thematically based discussions have a temporal dimension. Certain aspects of the Odyssey have been culturally prominent or recessive at certain times: the Renaissance, seeing it as a charter text of colonial expansion, emphasized the maritime wanderings; the eighteenth century found the teachable Telemachus more appealing than his father; Modernists were obsessed with the trip to the Underworld, and 'made it new' a thousand times.
The cultural manifestations of the Odyssey are not here comprehensively covered, and their selection, if not arbitrary, has been personal. There is more discussion of fiction, poetry, theatre and film than of painting and sculpture because I am more at home with texts than images. For a similar reason there is little said about danced versions of the Odyssey, for example the Czech ballet company Latérna Magika's epoch-making Odysseus, which has been revived repeatedly since 1987. Nor is there much on the many 'crank' theories about the Odyssey arguing, for example, that it contains secret instructions for sailing to Iceland across the Atlantic, via Circe in the Hebrides and the Cimmerians in Ulster. Others have suggested that it contains prophecies of later technological developments - for example, that Alcinous' gold and silver guard-dogs (7.91-4) are ancestors of the cyborg. Some, although more scientifically based, fail to see that the epic is not primarily concerned with empirical reality, for example the view that the Sirens were monk seals. Although such readings have an entertainment value, I have not dwelt upon them.
Labels have been attached to our dialogue with the ancient Greeks ever since the Renaissance (the authors whom Bernard Knox, in response to claims that classical culture has been hijacked by Western imperialism, has ironically called ODWEMS, the Oldest Dead White European Males). A late antique rhetorician liked the image of Homer 'sowing the seeds of art'. The old notion of the Classical Tradition or the Classical Heritage takes the idea of a legacy, passed passively down the generations like the family teaspoons. Judith Kazantzis says that Homer's epic of the high seas 'is perennially open to plunder itself and I am a pirate'. The theatre director Peter Sellars sees each classic text as an antique house that can be redecorated in the style of any era, while remaining essentially the same. Taplin proposes the more volatile image of Greek Fire, a substance used as a weapon that burns under water. Greek culture, according to this analogy, is still present in invisible yet incendiary forms. For the Prussian scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the metaphor of necromancy came from the scene before Odysseus enters the world of the dead: 'We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts.' More ambivalent is Walcott's description, repeated in poems including Omeros, of 'All that Greek manure under the green bananas' - the Greek legacy is excrement, but has also fertilized his Caribbean imagination. This beautifully captures the paradoxical nature of ancient Mediterranean discourses to peoples colonized by Western powers.
Various explanations have been proposed for the trans-historical appeal of a few ancient texts. Kristeva suggests that since every text is a 'mosaic of quotations', we must think in terms of intertextuality. According to Genette's terminology, the Odyssey is a 'hypotext' that has been 'transvaluated' into derivative 'hypertexts' such as the Aeneid and Joyce's Ulysses, although the hypertexts can subsequently become hypotexts themselves. More satisfying from an explanatory perspective is Vidal-Naquet's argument that ancient literature transcends history because of an unusual susceptibility to diverse interpretations. Raymond Williams would have suggested that this was in turn made possible by the ideological complexity of the original epic, according to his notion that any moment in time contains three strands of ideology: old-fashioned ideas on their way out, dominant ideas that the majority of people hold, and emergent ideas developed only by avant-garde segments of the population and which may not become mainstream for centuries. On this argument there are things in the archaic Odyssey - for example, Penelope's intelligence - that represented emergent ideology that might not become dominant for millennia.
'Emergent' ideology corresponds with the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin's notion that literature holds 'prefigurative' meanings that can only be released by reassessments lying far away in what he calls 'great time' in the future. Another way of putting this is Erich Auerbach's concept of 'figura' or 'umbra', which draws on medieval allegorists to develop a metaphor of 'prefiguration' or 'foreshadowing'. According to this argument, an element in an ancient text (e.g. Odysseus' wanderings) can in a mysterious but profound manner prefigure things that happen later (Columbus's voyages of exploration). Vernant further proposes that important artworks actively condition the shapes taken by future artworks, whether the conditioning takes the form of emulation, modification or rejection.
Yet none of these models accounts for the two-way nature of the relationship. Every new response to a classic text alters the total picture of its influence. When a great artwork like the Odyssey stimulates the production of others, such as Virgil's Aeneid, Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and Joyce's Ulysses (1922), cultural history changes irrevocably. According to T.S. Eliot, collectively such 'existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves'. But this ideal order will always be 'modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.' Thus Eliot would have seen Walcott's new reaction to the Homeric epic in Omeros as affecting the totality of the cultural order and changing forever how we see its precursors: 'for in order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered'.
That 'existing order' of cultural history has, moreover, now become international. The Odyssey is the intellectual property of the global village. This great quest epic has sometimes shaped the ways in which people in Africa or Mongolia come to understand their own living traditions of epic. This is likely in the case of the Sundiata (an African epic narrating the foundation in the thirteenth century CE of the Mali Empire in the western Sudan), which is still evolving in performance by singers called griots. Although the Sudanese give the name Mamoudou Kouyate to the epic's originator, it never became canonized in any single version, and the longstanding French presence makes contact with the Odyssey not unlikely. In the global village, in any case, it has become impossible not to be reminded of Proteus in the Odyssey when reading about Sumanguru, the shape-shifting sorcerer, or of the scenes in Sparta and Phaeacia when appreciating the hospitality which the exiled Sundiata received at the courts of the kings of Tabon and Ghana.
The two Homeric epics formed the basis of the education of everyone in ancient Mediterranean society from at least the seventh century BCE; that curriculum was in turn adopted by Western humanists. John Ruskin stressed that it does not matter whether or not Homer is actually read, since 'All Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen, by Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its principles.' Hegel had foreshadowed part of Ruskin's diagnosis in saying that 'Homer is that element in which the Greek world lived, as a human lives in the air', but even from pre-Roman days it was not only the Greek world. We do not know what mother tongue was spoken by the schoolchildren in Olbia in the northern Black Sea in the fifth century BCE, who painstakingly copied out a line in Odyssey 9 where Odysseus speaks of the land of the Ciconians, but they felt it had a local geographical reference. For a thousand years countless schoolboys living under the Macedonian or Roman Empires, whose first languages were Syrian, Nubian or Gallic, learned their alphabet through the first letters of Homeric heroes' names, developed their handwriting by copying out Homeric verses, and the art of précis by summarizing individual books of the Odyssey. They also committed swathes of Homeric hexameters to memory (in Xenophon's Symposium 3.5 Niceratus says that his upper-class father required him to learn all of Homer by heart), and studied them in early manhood when they were learning to be statesmen, soldiers, lawyers, historians, philosophers, biographers, poets, dramatists, novelists, painters or sculptors.
All the genres and media these men produced were formed in response to the great Ur-works in the Greek language. Sometimes they adapted them, and sometimes they quoted them. But the subterranean impact on the ancient psyche is more important. In the case of the Odyssey, no later author could ever again make a fresh start when shaping a narrative or a visual representation of a voyage, a metamorphosis, a run-in with savages, an encounter with anyone dead, a father-son relationship, a recognition token, or a reunion between husband and wife.
'If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded,' said Mircea Eliade, and the Odyssey was early identified as a 'foundational' text. In one sense, this status is misleading. The poem represents a late stage in the evolution of ancient Near Eastern mythical narrative poetry in cultures that had reached peaks of sophistication millennia earlier, above all the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Although it also shares material with the biblical story of Noah and the flood, elements in Gilgamesh are related to both the Iliad and the Odyssey: like Achilles, Gilgamesh has a beloved comrade-in-arms whose death he can scarcely abide. But the parallels with the Odyssey are more pervasive. Gilgamesh embarks on a perilous quest which involves the favour of the Sun God, cutting down trees, building a raft, sexual advances from a goddess, sacrilegiously killing the sacred bull of heaven, sailing across the Waters of Death, and an offer of immortality.
The Odyssey is also aware of its Greek tradition of bardic performances (see Fig. 1.1), and its language was spoken as early as the sixteenth century BCE. But if tales of heroic escapades that foreshadow the Odyssey were written down in the alphabets used by those Minoan Greeks, no records have survived. The Homeric poems began to be charter texts at the moment when, in about 750 BCE, they were inscribed in phonetic script. Their importance as the possession of Greek-speakers everywhere was identified immediately; knowledge of them became a passport into a psychological community spread over countless coasts and islands. Knowledge of Homer also spread amongst non-Greeks; Dio Chrysostom said that even primitive barbarians know Homer's name (Oration 53.6), and Homer is the only Greek author mentioned by name in the Talmud. The influence of the Odyssey can be seen on the Book of Tobit, the scriptural tale of the righteous Jew of Nineveh, probably written in Aramaic during the second century BCE.
(Continues...)
<%TOC%> Contents Acknowledgements....................vii
Excerpted from THE RETURN OF ULYSSES by EDITH HALL
Copyright © 2008 by Edith Hall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
PART I: GENERIC MUTATIONS 1. Embarkation....................3
2. Turning Phrases....................17
3. Shape-Shifting....................31
4. Telling Tales....................45
5. Singing Songs....................59
PART II: WORLD AND SOCIETY 6. Facing Frontiers....................75
7. Colonial Conflict....................89
8. Rites of Man....................101
9. Women's Work....................115
10. Class Consciousness....................131
PART III: MIND AND PSYCHE 11. Brain Power....................147
12. Exile from Ithaca....................161
13. Blood Bath....................I75
14. Sex and Sexuality....................189
15. Dialogue with Death....................203
Notes....................217
Bibliography....................243
Index....................281
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
• Generic Mutations
• Embarkation
• Turning Phrases
• Shape-Shifting
• Telling Tales
• Singing Song
• World and Society
• Facing Frontiers
• Colonial Conflict
• Rites of Man
• Women's Work
• Class Consciousness
• Mind and Psyche
• Brain Power
• Exile from Ithaca
• Blood Bath
• Sex and Sexuality
• Dialogue with Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
What People are Saying About This
Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting, and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying reflections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civilization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many-sided phenomenon.
— Marilyn B. Skinner, University of Arizona
In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images, and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy—the first female quester—and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, sometimes with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint and has much to offer that will both teach and delight.
— Richard F. Thomas, Harvard University
Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and influence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring figure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr. Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to find what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.—Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the U.S.A. to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to film and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political flair that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.—Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting, and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying reflections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civilization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many-sided phenomenon.—Marilyn B. Skinner, University of Arizona
In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images, and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy—the first female quester—and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, sometimes with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint and has much to offer that will both teach and delight.—Richard F. Thomas, Harvard University
Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and influence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring figure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr. Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to find what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.
— Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the U.S.A. to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to film and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political flair that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.
— Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
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